Ewout Dam

“De doden zijn dood en het maakt niet uit of hun een eer wordt bewezen. Het is voor ons, de levenden, dat het iets betekent. De herinnering heeft geen enkel nut voor hen die ze eert, maar ze dient degenen die zich ervan bedienen. Met mijn herinnering bouw ik mijn identiteit op, met haar troost ik me.”
― Laurent Binet, HHhH

“Most people define themselves by their work, or where they come from, or suchlike; we had lived too far inside our heads. It makes actuality damn hard to handle.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“And of those two ways of living - living in the moment and living outside it - which was more real?”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”
― John Williams, Stoner